Weekend in Paris Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Acknowledgements

  Praise for Robyn Sisman

  “A sparky, well-written take on why men and women can never be just good friends.”—Marie Claire (UK)

  “Just Friends is just bliss. Witty, warm and wise, it’s as good as an old movie for romantics.”—The Times (London)

  “Finely observed characters, vivid set pieces and laugh-aloud wit.”—The Mail on Sunday (UK)

  “With a dash of British humor and an adroit insight into family relationships and what really makes love work, Sisman’s lastest offering has what it takes.”—Publishers Weekly

  Robyn Sisman was born in Los Angeles and grew up in various parts of the States and Europe. She is the author of Special Relationship, Perfect Strangers and Just Friends, all of which were Sunday Times bestsellers and have sold worldwide in over twenty languages. She currently lives in England with her husband, the biographer Adam Sisman, and their children.

  By the Same Author

  Special Relationship

  Perfect Strangers

  Just Friends

  PLUME

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Michael Joseph edition.

  First Plume Printing, March

  Copyright © Robyn Sisman, 2003

  All rights reserved

  “I Love Paris”: Words and music by Cole Porter © 1953 Buxton-Hill Music Corp., USA, Warner/Chappell Music Ltd, London W6 8BS. Reproduced by permission of International Music Publications Ltd. All rights reserved.

  “I Get a Kick Out of You”: Words and music by Cole Porter © 1933 Harms Inc. USA, Warner/Chappell Music Ltd, London W6 8BS. Reproduced by permission of International Music Publications Ltd.

  All rights reserved.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Sisman, Robyn.

  Weekend in Paris / Robyn Sisman.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-68479-1

  1. British—France—Fiction. 2. Paris (France)—Fiction. 3. Young women—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.I75W44 2004

  813’.54—dc22 2003053663

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  For my father

  1

  Eighty feet below Trafalgar Square the train rattled southward, steepening its angle as it prepared to plunge beneath the Thames. It was Friday rush hour on an unseasonably mild afternoon in early October. The overcrowded carriage simmered with body heat and eau-de-commuter, a musty composite of stale perfume and warm armpit. Wheels screeched. Conversations droned. From all directions came the rhythmic hiss of personal stereos, like a chorus of invisible crickets.

  Molly Clearwater stood midway between the doors, wedged between a dandruffy male shoulder and an enormous backpack, with one arm crooked for support around a metal pole. At her feet was a small, worn suitcase. She held a paperback inches from her nose, the pages flat and open. But she wasn’t reading.

  “A stupid secretary.” That’s what Malcolm had called her. The tormenting words repeated themselves over and over in her head, and unconsciously she raised her chin, and shook back her tumble of fair hair, like a swimmer coming up for air. She was not a “secretary.” And how, she would like to know, could you call someone “stupid” who had a first-class degree in English Literature? Plus a distinction for her dissertation (“The Gothic Novel: From Mrs. Radcliffe to Daphne du Maurier”). The image of Malcolm in his exec-on-the-make suit, smirking with the conviction of his own sportswagon-driving, Men’s Health-reading, investment-checking, cell phone-blathering, hair-gelled rightness made her cheeks glow pink. The man couldn’t even spell “accommodation.”

  It was pathetic to remember how excited she’d been, only six months ago, to get this job. No more living at home, being driven barking bananas by her mother. No more slaving for a pittance at Bloom ‘n’ Veg in Minster Episcopi, sleepiest town in the universe. Destiny called! She and Abigail, her best friend from St. Swithin’s comprehensive, had gone out to celebrate at the Horse and Groom in the high street and got so plastered on Bacardi Breezers that Molly could barely ride her bike home. Abigail, who was a beauty therapist now (but a really good one), had conjured up a magical vision of Molly’s future—chic clothes and funky haircuts, Notting Hill restaurants and Soho bars, sophisticated men for whom an evening out did not mean a McDonald’s and a snog in their van. There would be promotion, her own swanky office, business trips. (Oh, bitter irony.)

  The job title was “Marketing Officer,” and the advertisement had specified a creative self-starter with degree-level education and superior writing skills—“Right up your Strasse,” as Malcolm Figg had said himself at the interview. Molly hadn’t cared that it was a pharmaceutical company rather than something more glamorous. The point was that she had a job. In London. She was launched on life, big-time.

  To begin with, it had seemed a treme
ndous adventure, joining the commuter rush to work, getting kitted out with free pens and multicolored paperclips, and taking possession of a fat stack of business cards printed with her own name. Determined to make a success of her first proper job, she had obeyed Malcolm’s every request, however incomprehensible. She leapt from her desk whenever he yelled, “Hey, you, whatever your name is,” ran to the coffee shop for cappuccinos, told callers that Mr. Figg was out when he was in, and in when was he was out, typed pages of handwritten gobbledygook and even—she burned with indignation to think of it now—organized the servicing of his beloved “motor,” complete with bull-bars, dangly dice and “Divers Do It Deeper” sticker. She pestered everyone with intelligent questions, and fought to be included in the important-sounding Progress Meetings, held weekly behind closed doors in the boardroom—which, to her dismay, had turned out to be no more than an interminable catalogue of things no one had got round to doing yet.

  There had been some wobbly moments, most embarrassingly last Easter when she’d hit the wrong button on her computer and copied in the entire office on an e-greeting from her mother, involving dancing daisies and an animated bunny singing “I just called to say I love you.” And possibly she had overdone the literary references in her press release for Trepazamine, though personally she still thought “Do you dare to eat a peach?” a refreshingly original copy line for an indigestion drug.

  But the point was that she had worked hard, brought her fine mind to bear on each trivial task, even stayed at her desk throughout the summer while everyone else took time off, returning smug and suntanned with fat packets of holiday snaps. And her reward had come, as she had known it must.

  About a month ago Malcolm had called her into his glass box of an office. Swivelling away from his Simpsons screensaver, he looked her over consideringly, gave his breath-freshener gum a few macho chomps, and drawled, “You speak French, don’t you?”

  Caught on the hop, Molly stared as blankly as if he’d asked her to mend his carburetor.

  “Unless you’re a lying cow,” Malcolm added, tossing her a document that she recognized as her own wildly exaggerated CV.

  “Oh, French.” Molly attempted a confident smile. “Oui. Bien sûr.”

  “Got a presentation coming up in Paris,” he told her. “Important medical conference, first weekend in October. I usually take one of the girls with me, to see to all the bits and pieces. No extra pay, of course—it’s a perk. You’d have to dress smart, mind, and suck up to those lah-di-dah doctors. This is business, not a frigging holiday. Play your cards right, we could be talking a whole new scenario promotion-wise.”

  Once she had clarified that he (Malcolm) was seriously intending to take her (Molly) to Paris (France), Molly could have fallen to her knees and kissed his gold signet ring. Her first business trip! All expenses paid. En-suite bathroom. Fluffy towels. Mini-bar. Maybe one of those remote-control thingies that enabled you to open and close the curtains while lounging Cleopatra-like in bed. And Paris! She’d never been to Paris—not that she hadn’t longed to ever since she’d first read Nancy Mitford when she was about fourteen. But it was a luxury, and so far luxuries hadn’t figured in her life.

  For as long as she could remember, money—the shortage thereof—had been a problem. Half of her clothes came from Oxfam; her school uniform had always been secondhand. She was the only child to carry her (organic) packed lunch in a wicker basket instead of the regulation plastic box with Disney stickers (“A waste of good money,” insisted her mother). “Travel” was by bus or bicycle. “Holidays” meant camping, or borrowed cottages out of season. She was probably the only twenty-one-year-old in Britain who’d never been further abroad than the Isle of Wight; now she was about to visit the most beautiful city in the world. The grandeur of it all made her swell with pride that Malcolm had chosen her, and she had worked even harder than before, collating data, sourcing yucky slides of diseased tissue and putting them on disk. She had managed to block out Malcolm’s boorish manners, his volleys of contradictory instructions and ridiculous mistakes, by holding Paris in her mind like a beacon of light, growing brighter and more dazzling each day.

  “Dunno how you stand that little prick,” Fatima in the Art Department commented one day, rolling her eyes. But it was easy. The more Malcolm shouted, the louder she hummed under her breath. I love Paris in the springtime, I love Paris in the fall . . . She bought guidebooks, practiced her French, spent money she absolutely did not have on a new “smart” outfit, and polished and pressed everything else into what she hoped would pass for a genuine business person’s wardrobe. She applied for a passport and had her photograph retaken eight times in the Boots’ booth until she was satisfied that it accurately conveyed her new status.

  This morning, the longed-for day had finally dawned. She had arrived at the office showered, nail-varnished, leg-shaved, hair-washed, eyebrow-tweezered and meticulously packed. On her desk was a stack of presentation folders ready to be boxed up, conference agendas, hotel info and the disk containing all the visual aids, neatly labeled, which she placed for maximum safety in her own suitcase, carefully cushioned in the folds of her cut-price pashmina. A car would be coming at five thirty this afternoon to take them to the airport. Tonight—tonight!—she would be in Paris . . .

  “Mind the gap,” intoned a voice from the loudspeakers. Molly felt unknown bodies push past her; then another wave of humanity surged into the carriage. It struck her afresh how Londoners ignored one another, even when pressed flesh to flesh. At home she could hardly step into the lane without someone tooting their horn in greeting or stopping her to describe precisely why their Victoria sponge had won first prize at the flower show, and she had many times longed for blissful anonymity. But this wilful blindness was shocking. She remembered the first time she’d encountered one of those refugee women in gypsy skirt and shawl, a toddler in one hand and a pathetic note in the other. (“I am from Albania. My husband is killed. My children are hungry. Please help me. Thank you.”) Mutely the woman had moved from one unseeing passenger to the next until Molly could bear it no longer and had recklessly emptied her wallet and begged the mother to take her child home at once. The patronizing stares of the other passengers exposed her provincial foolishness. Of course, she was streetwise now. She never gave more than a pound, and then only to women with children, men with nice dogs, and any busker who put an extra spring in her step. But she still found the lack of contact chilling. It was hard to make friends when people wouldn’t even meet your eye. Just now she could do with a friendly smile.

  It was at lunchtime that things had started to go wrong. Malcolm had gone to the pub with his mate from Finance, leaving Molly with so much work that there hadn’t been time even to buy a sandwich. Her only peaceful moment was when she ducked into the ladies’ for a moment of quiet contemplation with someone’s discarded Glamour. She had nearly finished the questionnaire (“Are YOU an ‘It’ Girl? Ten Ways to Find Out”), and was wondering if she’d lose marks by answering “No” to “Would you sleep with a guy on your first date?” when she experienced that uncomfortable sensation of hearing her name spoken aloud. She recognized the voices of Scylla and Charybdis, the two old gossips on Reception. She thought about calling, “I’m here, actually,” or clearing her throat, but instead found herself tucking her legs back out of sight and hardly daring to breathe as she strained to hear what they said over the sound of running taps.

  Molly listened, cheeks burning, arms wrapped tightly round her ribs. She waited until she heard the door swish open and shut again and the nattering voices drift away. Her hand shook a little as she unlocked the cubicle door. Automatically she walked over to the row of basins, put down her magazine and turned on the taps to wash her hands. Then she bent to wash her face, too, slapping the water against her cheeks, eyelids and forehead, as if she could cleanse her mind of what she’d overheard. So Malcolm thought he’d be “in her knickers” before the weekend was out, did he? He’d actually been boasting about it
round the office. Apparently he’d succeeded before with other “girls” he took abroad and was confident of scoring again.

  Molly screwed up her face and pressed her fingers to her temples. All this time she had worked her heart out, proud of being professional, doing her best to respect Malcolm’s position as her boss, preposterous though he was—but to him she was nothing more than a female body to be groped. Molly reached for a paper towel and rubbed it roughly over her face, blurring the makeup she had applied so carefully that morning. Her round pink face with its blue eyes and the swooping eyebrows inherited from God-knows-where looked back at her from the mirror. What had Malcolm seen to make him think she was easy? Unconsciously she put a hand to the open neck of her shirt. She couldn’t help having largish breasts. Nobody could accuse her of flaunting them. Still, she decided to do up another button.

  But she resented having to do so. Malcolm was a wally. And he was so old—maybe as much as thirty. Anyway, she could never be attracted to a man whose mind she didn’t admire. Molly wondered if she could face a long weekend fending him off. Perhaps she should talk to Personnel about sexual harassment? But then she might miss out on Paris.

  She squared her shoulders. It was perfectly possible for an intelligent, professional woman to deal with this alone. She was not a prude, after all. A new defiance seeped into her veins as she snatched up her magazine. No, she was not an “It” girl, thanks all the same, and she would not be sleeping with Malcolm on their first date for the simple reason that there wouldn’t be one. Malcolm could think what he liked. She, Molly Clearwater, was going to Paris and that was that.